Your moral code begins by damning man as evil, then demands that he practice a good which it defines as impossible for him to practice… It demands that he starts, not with a standard of value, but with a standard of evil, which is himself, by means of which he is then to define the good: the good is that which he is not. A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an isolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold a man’s sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality… To punish him for a crime he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. To hold him guilty in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason. (The) myth decleares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge-he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil-he became a moral being… The evils for which they damn him are reasn, morality, creativeness, joy-all the cardinal values of his existence….the essence of his nature as a man. Whatever he was- that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love- he was not a man.Ayn Rand
About This Quote
In his essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus again points out the absurdity of a moral code that requires a person to be what he is not. If a person’s crime lies in his past, then the punishment should also lie in his past. If a person is born evil, then he will remain evil. The truth is that “man is weak by nature and it is only through the practice of virtue that he becomes strong.” In other words, moral codes are manmade and must be opposed as such.
Source: Atlas Shrugged
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